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England's War Aims Restated by Aleister Crowley
Brittania Theatre. Scrap of Paper. Farce in 3 acts.
Words by the Marquess of Lansdowne, Music by Mr. Lloyd George
Act I. Lord Lansdowne asks England to restate War Aims. "He is a crazy old scoundrel—we will not restate our war aims".
Act II. We discover the Lord Lansdowne has been misunderstood—he never meant to suggest that we should restate our war aims.
Act III. We restate our War Aims.
Time. The present. The action of the play occupies six weeks.
This little drama had gone very well at the first house. The lesson for the Americans is the exact-value of Mr. Lloyd George—a quarter all but two bits. We can read behind the bluster and brag and bombast. It reminds one a little of Elijah on the mountain. The Lord was not in the whirlwind or the fire or the thunder, but in the still small voice.
Oh if but people would learn to think for themselves. There would be no need for any statement (let alone restatement) of war aims. England's vital necessity is an obvious one. Let me try to put it once more as I did in the Fatherland of January 4, 1917. "Brittania est Delenda" but from an even more obviously and frankly British point of view.
England is an Island Empire. All British possessions are politically islands. On the one hand, we have island fortresses—Gibraltar (with a narrow neck of land which could be raked by warships at need), Malta, Aden (with an untraverseable hinterland of desert), Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, and dozens of other stations varying in naval and military importance with the political importance of the neighbouring nations.
The later possessions are also islands in a sense. India could only be invaded via Afghanistan and the whole easter policy of Britain had been devoted to keep that country strong, independent and friendly, as a barrier against Russia.
Recently Persia has been involved in this policy. The purchase of the Suez Canal shares by Disraeli was but another defence to India by securing the shortest line of communication.
The rapprochement between Turkey and Germany, which should never have been permitted, threatened both the Suez communication and the Afghanistan front. It also, more seriously still, threatens Egypt which, occupied in the first place merely to guard the Canal, was found to be itself a possession of value only second in importance to India itself.
Colonies like Canada, British Guiana, Honduras, and most of the African possessions are also islands, either because of the difficulty of crossing the hinterlands or because of the pacific nature of their neighbours. Canada is defended on the North by the one and on the South by the other.
In Africa, no sooner is the country opened up somewhat by railways than England finds an excuse to destroy even her most peaceably neighbours. If we can't have a sea frontier or a desert frontier we must make one. At the present time there is no alternative for England but to make all Africa British with the exception of such corners as are still cut off by the Sahara or other great deserts. A railroad from Tripoli to Egypt would not necessarily mean war with Italy, as the road to Rome lies right across the British oceans, but it would mean war if Italy increased her military strength in Tripoli to a point where Egypt might be in danger.
Similarly, should the United States become a great military power, Canada would cease to be a political island. There would be 4000 miles or so of utterly indefensible frontier, and the answer could only be war. Can any one be surprised if British statesmen, seeing this catastrophe imminent, should prefer even an inconclusive peace with Germany? The only hope of averting the most terrible of all wars is to patch up some kind of a peace and trust to American fatuity to draw in her horns and revert to her old system.
Failing this, an alliance with Germany, having as object the dismemberment of the U.S.A. would become necessary.
Such is the inner meaning of the Lansdowne letter and the Lloyd-georgian volte-face.
Now it is as useless to discuss "The freedom of the Seas" with England as it would be to discuss "The Freedom of the Railroads" with the United States, or any other continental power. The seas and the roads are already free in the sense that any one who likes may make use of them; England is even so quixotically generous as to make no charge for the use of her oceans.
If I wanted to run my own car over the Southern Pacific I should expect a bill; but I can sail my yacht from here to Madagascar without paying a cent to the owner of the ocean highways. But England can no more consent to the existence of a fleet capable of threatening her communications than America could permit England to build fortresses commanding the main lines of the country.
I might give a man control of my arteries in a sense [to] allow him to use them in a sense by working for him, but I should never permit him to affix a tourniquet. It is quite foolish to blame England for her policy; it is vital, it is forced upon her by geographical and economic accident.
Of late years the consolidation and expansion of Germany had become an indirect menace; but it was only when the German Naval Programme threatened her lines of communication that she renewed her policy of a century, and embraced Russia.
It was this fatal cast of the die which determined the withdrawal of her support of Turkey. Germany stepped in, and the Drang nach Osten, reaching to Baghdad, added a yet more formidable weapon to the armory that was being forged against her.
Once the facts were realized there was nothing for it but to be the hammer or the anvil. Either England or Germany must be smashed. Only one further detail needed consideration; how to put Germany in the wrong.
Well, two of the Teutonic cousins are well mauled; it is time to think of the third and reconsider the situation. Will Germany give up the Baghdad idea, and will she offer guarantees of naval harmlessness, on the seas and under them? England cannot possibly consent to any terms which do not fully satisfy her on these two points; for they are matters of life and death. Any statesman who should make peace without the most absolute satisfaction on both issues would be indeed a traitor.
What the details of such arrangement may be must be left to the naval and military strategists. For my part, I would urge that the cessation of Heligoland would block hostile egress in the North Sea, and that a new Gibraltar should be found in the Baltic. Germany must of necessity retire from the coast of the Low Countries, and these must be sufficiently strengthened to meet any possible repetition of 1914. France should annex Belgium.
As to the East, I am assured that the only solution is a reconstruction of the Turkish Empire. England, the greatest Moslem power, should make it her sacred duty to restore Islam.
If this be done, and if the United States will consent to beat these new swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks—the policy which has made her in the past the most prosperous of the nations—then the lion can lie down with the lamb for a century or so, at the least.
But woe be to Britain if under stress or weariness she fail to fight to the death for the one essential condition of her political security: "Brittania rules the waves"—and her other lines of internal communication, such as Afghanistan and the C.P.R.
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